This Warehouse of Trinkets is a place for Free Internet content, mostly video games and pen and paper RPG material.
There is a weekly review about some item to add to the shelves; and The Storeman will periodically babble at the counter, giving some advise or just thinking out aloud.
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Oct 1, 2013

DMs, don’t hog the spotlight

Babbling at the Counter #11 –
Pen and Paper

DMs, don’t hog the spotlight

Here's a little tip: No one
knows your character better than you. So, who is qualified to describe him and
his powers? You.

Something great happened last
time I was GMing. A friend was playing a witch, and she needed to get some
information out of a dude. Instead of asking, she went right for the magiks.
The witch drugged him, and then entered his mind. Kind of overkill, I'm aware,
but it was for the best.

"I enter his mind as the
coven has taught me, by visualizing a big castle full of his thoughts and
memories" she said, and just like that I had a mindscape to play with.

We hadn't agreed on how a
mind was from the inside, I mean, heck, we hadn't even talked about this kind
of spells. She was winging it; she had as much idea of what would happen as I
did. So she described her actions (throwing in a little backstory for good
measure) and rolled the dice.

It was very nice to see the
player take the lead on setting the scene. We have all seen those players that
just roll the dice and wait for an answer, and that sometimes is because lots
of GMs work that way.

If that works for you, keep
on rocking. Me? I'll let the others do the heavy lifting and just keep sending
trouble and bad guys their way. Most of the time, what they come up with is a
hundred times better than what I had in mind.